Audio tutorial: add audio to your website, wavs, midis, streaming audio,music, webmaster resources

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Audio Tutorial

This Virtually Ignorant page gives you an audio tutorial of the basics of adding audio to your page or the option of having a professional do it for you. You can take advantage of wav, midi, or streaming audio formats easily.

Click on the controls to turn off the music.

The Internet isn't just for visual media anymore! Here, are some of the more basic uses of midi and wav files. Sound is here. Turn on your speakers for the audio tutorial!

Embedded Midis: With the newer versions of MSIE and Netscape, there is a built-in ability to play the midis.
<embed src="entertainer.mid" hidden="true" autostart="true"></embed>

The code to make it play indefinitely is loop=true.
<embed src="entertainer.mid" hidden="true" loop="true" autostart="true"></embed>

Though we always recommend adding controls for people who don't agree with your taste in music. The code for that would be:
<embed src="entertainer.mid" hidden="false" autostart="true" controls="smallconsole" height="25" width="100"></embed>

Please be warned that the tag <bgsound> is specific for MS Internet Explorer, and will not work with Netscape at this time.

Graphic Link: A list of sounds that people can click on a button of their choosing. Use a graphic of your choice and hyperlink it to the file. Let's use a wav file this time, like so:
<a href="beerpour.wav"><IMG SRC="button.jpg" BORDER=2 ALT="beer">beer pour</a>
looks like this:beer pour

Text Link: If you have a whole list of audio files you want to show off, or you like your page to load faster, use a text link:
<a href="entertainer.mid">The Entertainer</a>
looks like this: The Entertainer

Streaming Audio is used to have a file play as it's downloading. You can convert standard wav files with RealProducer to streaming RealAudio files. Save this file as yourfile.ra, and now build a file called yourfile.ram which has only the following code in it:
http://www.yourdomain.com/yourfile.ra
or rather the exact address of yourfile.ra. To have this file automatically start, you can add a META tag in your <head> section, usually after the <title></title>:
<title>yourtitle</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh"; CONTENT="2;URL=yourfile.ram">
where the number 2 is the number of seconds before starting. You can also have a button or text link as above. To download RealProducer Basic for free personal use, you can go to RealNetworks.com

You can easily add a jukebox to your site with CoffeeCup Web JukeBox. The software takes your Mp3 files and adds them to your choice of 20 players. Then you just cut and paste some code that the JukeBox software produces for you, and you have a jukebox on your site playing your favorite tunes. CoffeeCup offers a free trial of this software, so try it out: CoffeeCup Web JukeBox.

Here are a few links to places to pick up some audio files on the internet. Please review copyright laws before assuming that you can use whatever you find on the net without explicit permission.

Free Sounds-- Wav, MP3, and Midi files, plus streaming resources.
Wav Archives at Yahoo! Directory -- Remember the Yahoo! directory? It still works.
Open Directory Sound Files-- Your choice of file type.

RECOMMENDED LINKS

CoffeeCup Web JukeBox
Need storage space on the net for your media files? Try Streamload: